House Tour : Out With The Old, In With The New

I have promised you guys a full house tour for awhile, and I'm finally going to deliver on it.

Even though this house is no longer mine.  We closed on it at the end of April.

To make a long story short, Chris accepted a job out in Dallas, TX, so for the first time in our whole lives we are no longer Floridians.  We were actually officially homeless for the first time since college!  We lived in corporate housing for a little over a month, and closed on a beautiful new home in McKinney, TX at the end of May.

Our house wasn't even on the market for a week before we were under contract for 99% of our asking price after receiving multiple offers.  We closed in less than 6 weeks.  Happy happy joy joy dance plus lots of mayhem and tears and hugs and yay's all around.  It's been a whirlwind of a few months to say the least!

Onto the Tour!

The Back Yard.  We didn't sod all the way down to the back, so it looks a little barren in this picture.  The new sod that we laid a year ago has started spreading and filling in the dead areas though.  Hopefully that'll continue on for the new owners!

The in-law suite bathroom.  We didn't really do much in here...

Kalia's bathroom.  We painted the walls, took out the old shower door, painted the cabinets, and faux painted the countertop.

The in-law suite bedroom.  I wish I had before pictures to go along with this, but I was in panic mode to get it done.  This room used to be Barney purple...blah!  I painted it Moonshine by Benjamin Moore and painted all of the trim white.

Kalia's room.  Ah, this was such a labor of love...I'm not gonna lie,  I cried the last time I walked through here.  We completely gutted this room and pretty much built everything that went into it.  I replicated this as closely as possible in the new home.  I really loved everything about it!

The daybed room.  This room used to have two daybeds in it, but I moved one into Kalia's room, and then into her playroom.  Chris installed the floors one weekend before we listed it.  It's the same floors we installed in Kalia's room.

The front door and the dining room. 

We hung up mirrors that went to the dresser in the in-law suite, and I painted little shelves and put fresh flowers in there for showings.

The exterior of the front door with the hanging pendant that we installed.

Our living room.  I painted the back of those book shelves along the wall and really loved how it turned out.  All of this trim was an off-white too, so I painted that all shiny white as well.

I also did that key art and those pallet shelves...

and made the Hart sign, and hung the ski's in an x with pictures of Chris and I from our snowboarding adventures.  I'm glad that my 'stuff' gets to stay with us!  I am happy to report that almost all of it fits in perfectly at the new home.

Here's a few of the front of the house, which we re-painted once Kalia got here.

We had to leave the Gator flag.  It was actually a part of the negotiations!

Moving back to the inside...the kitchen.  Oh, how I loved that kitchen.  I pretty much did nada here.  It was the huge huge selling point when we bought the house.

Kalia's playroom.  This room evolved quite a bit since she arrived.  The pictures over the daybed are just black fabric with a picture of her from every week for her first year.  It's amazing how quickly she changed!!  I painted the chalk wall, built and painted the ledges, and then added a family picture wall above the ledges.  Both Kalia and I miss the chalk wall.  If I'm being 100% honest, I don't miss the dust though!

The entry to the Master Bathroom from our bedroom, or the vanity area.  I painted this area twice, did all of the trim white, and we took off the closet doors and spray painted them to get rid of the yucky gold color.

Last time you saw our Master Bath, it was the light blue color.  I painted it gray (moonshine by benjamin moore, my favorite light gray color to go to) because I felt it was more calm and would appeal to a larger audience.

Next up, our Master Bedroom.  I re-did that trunk that my parents gave me and added my sewing machine cabinet that I also re-did to finish out the space.  We've upgraded furniture at the new house, so I can't wait to share what our room looks like now.

Here's a picture of the office.  This room also got painted, and we took out the built-ins, sanded them down, and re-stained them.  They were a blonde honey color before.  I also painted the back of them to make our things pop.

This is the office bath that Chris and I completely gutted and re-did just days before listing the house.  There was striped wall paper and an old toilet, laminate vanity, and builder grade mirror in here.  For such a little room, it required a ton of work, but the difference was amazing.  As you can imagine, we were in a rush, so just use your imagination for the before pictures!

And last, but most certainly not least, the pool deck.  Oh pool, how I miss you.  Our new home does not have one.  I think we'll wind up putting one in, but that yard and that pool were irreplaceable!  

This house and our old neighborhood and our old state, ha, were so hard to leave, but we had to do what was right for our family.  As soon as I quit my job, Chris put out his resume, which is why things got so scattered here on the blog.  Balancing a baby plus Chris interviewing and making up his time with his old job and trying to get house projects done during naptimes and bedtimes because I knew the move was coming was quite a bit challenging.

I'm hoping that I can come back here and share projects and our lives with the four of you that still read this blog (hey 'rents!!).  I'm still working on finishing up getting the last of the things unpacked...like my sewing machine...yuck!!

In personal news, my little girl turned two last month.  Crazy how time flies.  Here's a picture of Kalia jumping on her big gift on her second birthday.  We're still a little hair challenged!!

Hope everyone is doing well!

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Nursery Room - Daybed

On Wednesday, I showed you my mis-adventures in pillow making.  The reason I needed five new pillows is because one of my daybeds from the daybed room landed a new home in the nursery.  That's been my plan for their more permanent home all along...to put them in our "someday kids" room, which has now become Kalia's nursery.  I really like the idea of having a place where Chris can sit and hang out too while I'm nursing.  It'll also be a fun place to read Kalia's books to her when she gets a bit bigger.

I drew out the plans for this room, but still wound up changing my mind on placement.  Initially, the daybed wound up on the closet wall :

I took this picture for my own benefit...to see how everything tied in together.  And now it's the only picture I can find of the daybed along that wall. Sorry that I don't have a better picture of the daybed with all of the pillows and nothing extra on it!

Location wise, it was okay there, but it was kind of the star of the room, and I really want Kalia's crib to be the star.  I also didn't like that it pretty much completely covered up Kalia's toybox from view when you walked in.  I let it sit there for a few weeks to think and process it.  Do any of you guys do that?  Move something, then see if it'll grow on you?

That area rug is another one of those things...I left it down for a bit to see if it would grow on me, and it didn't...so don't get too excited about seeing it in that space.  It's on the list of things to return relatively soon!

On Saturday, I had Chris help me move the daybed to the wall next to the bookshelves.

I think it's found it's permanent home...

At least for now anyways!  From the view above, it looks like the daybed is a lot closer to the bookshelves than it really is.  There's another image later on where you can see that there's still walking room to grab a book on the lower shelves.  Here are the views from when you walk in Kalia's room :

Too bad I don't have more of a panoramic lens...but you get the idea now that the daybed isn't covering up Kalia's toybox anymore.

The pile of frames that were on the bed in the first picture are what I want to hang above the daybed, but I needed to make sure that I really liked the placement of it before I put any holes into the wall.

So far for Kalia's nursery, we've built everything.  We have one more major thing to finish building, and then we're putting up our saws and getting onto the decorating!  That actually kind of makes me sad...I'm much better with power tools than I am with crafts, so we'll see how the rest of her room turns out!

And now for my favorite part, the before and after!  Which I'll do again once I get something on these walls, but it still amazes me every time I put up an image that we started with after we emptied out what was once the junk room.

Before

After : Removed carpet, installed flooring, painted walls, painted baseboards, removed old intercom and patched hole, hung curtains, built and hung bookshelves, moved daybed that we'd previously built in here, made new pillows for daybed, painted ceiling, installed new fan (barely visible, but you can see how much more light is in here), and installed new window.  Whew!!

You can see from this viewpoint that there's still room to walk / stand between the bookshelves and the daybed.  It makes me so happy to think of Kalia toddling up to pick out her book, and the three of us cozying up on this bed to read them together.  Beyond happy...beyond excited...words really can't begin to express it!

Stay tuned for a big project reveal later on this week!  Hope everyone had a great weekend.  Happy Monday!

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Finishing the Daybed Room

I left you guys back in October with adding a shelf to the daybed room.  In that post, I said all that was left to do was hang some curtains, build a side table, add a rug, and maybe add a mirror.  Welll...you guys didn't know that I was already pregnant at that point, but needless to say, this room became bottom of the 'to-do' list.

And then in deciding how the hey I'm going to decorate / design the nursery, I've realized that if I spend anymore money in the daybed room, it's money wasted.  When we have baby #2, I'll want to completely re-do it anyways (don't worry, I have plans for my daybeds!), so I don't want to spend anything extra on a rug or window coverings...and I'm giving up on the idea of building a corner table.  I'm learning to adapt to my current situation instead of going crazy trying to get everything checked off.

My oldest sister will appreciate this post though.  The windows desperately needed new blinds and curtains hung.  When they all came to visit last summer, my nieces woke up the first morning with the sun.  Well before their normal wake up time.  To solve that problem in the meantime, we hung a blanket from the window.  My sister tried to snag a picture of us hanging it, but we were too quick, so she posed with our beautiful window solution:

Obviously we needed to come up with a better solution (even though my sister looks especially pleased because she knew she wouldn't be woken up at an ungodly hour!).  Especially because they're all coming over again next week!

Here's what the room actually looked like sans blanket :

I remembered I had green curtains folded up in a closet from our 1st house, so I decided they were close enough of a green that they'd work in here.  When we removed the blinds from the nursery window, we transported them over here.  I'm not exactly sure what we're going with in there yet, so stay tuned for that one!  These work well in here for now though.  The other ones were broken off in multiple places...kind of defeating the purpose of blinds.

In our attempt to cross off items from projects that seem to never end, we hung these the other weekend.  It's been stormy and not sunshiny here for quite awhile, so you're just going to have to get less than ideal pictures!  Sorry!

I actually like the way the curtains balance out the room.  By hanging the curtains as wide and as high as we could, we really made that window seem bigger than it really is.  And my sister will be happy with sleeping kiddos in here!!

We've been working on TONS of stuff for the nursery all week, but haven't quite finished anything just yet!  We've got to get the floors installed first, so hopefully those turn out to go relatively quickly, and hopefully I'll have nursery picture updates for next week.

Hope everyone has a fantastic weekend!!

Update :  (To see each step of making over this room I did in detail, see the following links : painting the floor, building the left daybed, building the right daybed, finishing old Pottery Barn Shelves, Re-doing a Sewing Machine Cabinet, Making the Yellow Pillows, and Making the Florally Pillows).

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Double Vision : Making A{nother} Daybed

I made my first daybed back in May, and immediately decided I wanted to build another one for the same room.  Ana White of Knock Off Wood is so amazing for providing free plans to make this possible.  If you haven't checked out her plans yet, please do so!  I wanted the beds to match up like this picture and put a table in between them.

Image courtesy of Pottery Barn

When my sister and I planned a date for her family to come over, I immediately went out and got the wood to build another daybed so that both of my nieces could have a place to sleep.

I have had this picture in my sneak peak section for forever...close to three months...entirely too long!  In my first daybed post, I wrote that next time I'd paint before building.  So that's exactly what I did.  I sanded, primed, sanded, painted, sanded, painted, and then built.

The problem with this approach for me is that I'm not a professional builder, and my pieces don't go together perfectly.  So, I sanded and sanded and sanded once I got the boxes together, which meant inevitably, I removed a lot of my paint and had to repaint the entire thing a million times (paint, sand, paint, sand, etc.)

I did manage to get the bed put together before my nieces came over, but I hadn't re-painted any of it yet and you could definitely tell it needed quite a few more coats.  I thought I took pictures of this, but I can't find them, so you only get the finishing pictures.  I did exactly the same as the daybed back in May, so if you'd like more step by step pictures, or the finishing details, go here to see them.

Ready to see the finished product?!

Here she is!

Of course I have to add a few details shots too.  I sanded down the edges again so I could emphasize the clean lines look, stained them, and repainted around the faces to keep it bright and white.

Here's a picture of both daybeds in the room next to each other.  Yes, the pillows have changed.  I'm still working on getting everything there...I stole the yellow and white pillows from my living room.

You'll never be able to see these sides most of the time...I plan on putting a table here, but I still wanted to show that I at least finished them.

I've made so much progress in this room, but it still has a ways to go.  It's not perfect, but it's miles upon miles better (and at a reasonable cost!) than what I started out with...which was this:

I've painted the floors, painted the trim, painted the doors and door knob, built a daybed, revamped an old sewing machine cabinet, and now finished building another daybed.

Let's end on one last cheery picture...

Ahhh...SO much better!  Do you agree?!

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